My friend asked that question as we sat in her car in the parking lot outside Costco. We had gone to get more liquor for our double wedding the following day and I had cried all the way there. I was trying to understand and explain why I had been crying all week and was having a complete breakdown in her car.

My monologue went something like this:

“I am overwhelmed and I need to clean the bathrooms and I still need to iron our clothes for the wedding and I can’t find the list of things we need to take to the venue and I am sad that neither my sister nor Deborah are coming to the wedding but I am also upset that my friend from Seattle is coming because it’s such a long way to come and maybe she shouldn’t go to so much trouble! And I can’t help but wonder if maybe Luisa deserves better than me because I am an underemployed writer and so clearly downwardly mobile and every time I think of exchanging vows with her, I start crying again because she can do better. She should do better! No. That’s not true. I know that’s silly and I really need to stop being silly because I’m annoying everyone including myself and I really need to go grocery shopping but, instead, I just keep going places and buying mascara. I don’t even wear mascara but I have mascara and make up remover but I don’t even have a cucumber for Zeca’s lunch and none of this matters anyway because Luisa and I exchanged vows in 2000 and Zeca can eat carrots. Do you have a kleenex? I don’t have a kleenex and I need to blow my nose. I also need to do laundry and vacuum the upstairs and I need a throat lozenge and why won’t Zeca just eat carrots?!”

After I had completely unraveled, my friend asked her question and, when she did, I sobbed harder and squeaked out, “Yes!” and then my friend burst into tears as well. So, we cried in the parking lot because we were excited about the wedding but felt we shouldn’t be, because we were happy but were happy before, because we wanted our friends and family there but felt that we couldn’t expect it of them, because this was a wedding but we had both had weddings before so this one shouldn’t matter.

But it did matter and we were both struggling to reconcile that fact with the commitments we’d made to our partners long ago. To embrace this wedding somehow felt like denying the validity of the ones we’d had before that had not been legally recognized.

Luisa was in Trinidad and I’d been alone all week and I felt like I’d been holding all these emotions in my hands and like water, they kept slipping through my fingers no matter how tight my grip. Sitting in that parking lot, I opened my hands and let them spill out and I could breathe.

Luisa came back from Trinidad that night and we made our way to the wedding rehearsal and I was ready. Everything that came before meant something and this wedding meant something too.

On Saturday, we gathered at the Midtown Exchange with friends and family (including my sister and nephew who surprised me) to make legal the commitment we made long ago. The ceremony began with a video a friend made of our children visiting the Orpheum Theater where Luisa and I first met, a coffee shop where we had more than one date and the first apartment we shared. Then, my friend and I sang a duet and I messed up twice before making jokes and starting again. Our officiant talked about our rich history and our children read haiku they had written about love, family and parenting, commitment and community. We exchanged vows and rings and then my son and my friends’ oldest daughter stood together to read a community blessing. Then, we were pronounced married and we kissed…more than once. I cried more than once during the ceremony but they were happy tears as I took notice of all that we have created together.

And, my mascara didn’t run.

Later, more friends joined us and we ate cake and drank and toasted each other and danced late into the night.

The next day, I woke up with Luisa as I have for the past 20 years and I felt no different.

It was a beautiful wedding, a perfect night. It meant everythingand nothing at all. I’ve made peace with that.

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Vikki Reich

Author: Vikki Reich
Vikki writes about the intersection of contemporary lesbian life, parenthood and pop culture at her personal blog Up Popped A Fox. She is the co-director of Listen To Your Mother Twin Cities. In 2013, she completed the Foreword Writing Apprenticeship in Creative Nonfiction at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and is a 2013 recipient of the Beyond the Pure Fellowship for writers. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and two kids and, in the real world, she never speaks of herself in the third person.

Oh Vikki… this is beautiful and perfect and makes perfect sense. And the best part? Your mascara didn’t run! No, seriously, it seems like a perfect day, and one that just further cemented the love that all of you have for each other. Many wishes of happiness to all of you!

“Meant everyting and nothing at all.” Yep. Funny what happens when our experiences stand outside of social norms: the emotions attached to them feel downright confusing. Thanks for the honest, raw portrayal of that truth.

“To embrace this wedding somehow felt like denying the validity of the ones we’d had before that had not been legally recognized.”

That, Vikki, says so much, and for so many of us in this “hinge” generation: old enough to have found and committed to life partners pre-state recognition, and of the mind to avail ourselves of it in some fashion now that it is arriving (inch by inch, state by state).

You describe so eloquently my own feelings five years ago in the summer of 2008, before the passage of Proposition 8 and after the CA Supreme Court recognized the constitutional roots of equal marriage. (“The Hitchin’ Post” was my attempt to pin it down.) What really mattered to my partner and me (and I still call her my partner after our legal hitching; can’t hear the word “wife” without camp overtones, but then that’s me) was the commitment ceremony that we had held over a decade before, with our friends and family and without, thankyouverymuch, the state. Whom we didn’t invite because it didn’t want to be invited anyway and probably would have been a drunk, obnoxious guest if it had been there.

And yet: this thing now, it also is something. Figuring out what entails a journey you’ve just helped us to witness.

This issue and these moments are so shot through with complexity and contradiction, and I thank you for dedicating the time and your prodigious skill to capturing it all.

Okay, but that doesn’t explain why *I* was so emo about your wedding … ridiculously so. It’s like what you and Wise Zeca said … how many families get to have a ceremony celebrating their love and their union at this chapter? (Mineral Fusion and Puffs should underwrite this wedding.)

Damn you! It’s one thing to make me cry when I am sitting at home in my froggy pajamas. But I am on lunch break at WORK! I am training mental health workers in suicide prevention. In a psychiatric hospital. If anybody walks by and sees me, I will be admitted.

This is so much how I feel about my wedding in May. And it’s even worse because I am Canadian. We could have done this years ago. It is so important to us. And it means nothing. Thank you for putting words to it. Don’t stop writing. Please.

Ah, I bet there were some sweet tears of recognition and vindication, of the World finally acknowledging what you and your friends and family knew to be true and real all along. The World saying it was real *now* didn’t make it so, but still nice to hear just the same. Maybe also a tear or two of “Hey, it’s been 20 years and two kids and…you want some more of it? You do? Me too.” Whatever the reasons, crying is good. Here’s a tissue.

Beautiful. You captured so perfectly that tension between the legal and the non-legal, the knowing it matters but feeling that it shouldn’t. I was struck by the beauty of having your children participate in a ceremony and how much meaning they added to this second day of commitment. Congratulations. 🙂